Most businesses rely on spam filters to determine the legitimacy of incoming emails they get. Yet filtering technology remains far from perfect, and many junk email still winds up in users' inboxes. This makes it important for people to be able to visually spot the differences between a real email and a digital spammers generated email.
One of the most solid solutions that is used in the fight against spam is a spam filter. Either a software or hardware based appliance, the spam filter searches each and every email for certain triggers. Should there be enough red flags in an email message, that message is simply sent over to the spam box to help keep the inbox free and clear of junk messages.
Unfortunately, legitimate email messages sometimes wind up in the spam folder only to be deleted later on. If these messages were important, that can pose a huge problem.
Finding the Differences
Subject: Our first action when examining an email should be to check its subject line. Spammers try their best to make their emails look legitimate, yet an email's heading often betrays its true motive. Phishing messages can usually be identified by headings such as "Immediate Action Required" or "Verify Your Account." All of these emails can be erased with no regret.
Source: An email's "from" line can provide significant clues about a message's worthiness. You already know the names of people you regularly correspond with, so it's easy to spot messages from these individuals. On the other hand, emails with a from line that contains only a company name are almost always spam or phishing lures. To research any message's legitimacy, check out the email's return path to verify that it leads back to the person or organization that it purports to come from.
Date: The dates can sometimes provide a clue to an email's value, and take less than a second to check. If a message with a far past or future date suddenly arrives, it's more than likely from a spammer seeking attention.
Content: If you're still not sure about a particular message's authenticity, examine its content. If an email addresses you as a "friend," "valued customer," or "colleague," you can be sure that its sender doesn't know your name. Poor grammar, bad spelling and awkward language are other signs that should arouse your attention.
Purpose: Never open an attachment unless you know who sent it, or at least understand why it was sent to you. Downloading unknown attachment can also be a gateway for further threats.
Spam Filters
Spam filters have many common spam sensing capabilities. These are triggered by message’s subject line and words that are in it. Some of the more common triggers are:
- A blank subject line.
- Abbreviated months (for example, Apr. for April).
- The word approved, or any derivation.
- Words like at no cost, free, low cost, reduced price or any derivation.
- Subject lines in all capital letters.
- Words that center around weight loss or losing weight.
- The words lower your bills, or any derivation.
- Using dollar signs.
- Using words that attempt to create urgency, such as alert, urgent, act now, warning or any other derivations.
- Using the names of any pharmaceuticals or drugs.
- Trying to obfuscate words or misspelled words.
Any combination of these triggers will almost certainly result in messages being turned away as spam automatically.